On ad-blockers and free content

David Risley posts about his feelings upon discovering that some of his readers are using ad blockers. David’s blog, PCMech, is a professional deal that costs significant amount of money to run, ads are the way he does this. David contends that by blocking those ads the user is in fact stealing.

I’m not so sure….

I read the local broadsheet most mornings, I also get a number of business magazines. All have advertising but I chose whether to partake of that advertising or not. Now no one would argue that by taking the classified section of the newspaper and binning it without opening it constitutes stealing – and this action isn’t entirely dissimilar to using an ad-blocker to avoid annoying adverts (that no one ever acts upon – but that’s for another post altogether).

Sure sites need to pay their costs – but if advertising provides a wholly unnatural, annoying and intrusive addition to their experience, surely they’re justified in finding ways to do without those very ads – just like my disposing of the classified section.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

3 Comments

Ben, what is he on?
We can’t complain that whenever we find some surreptitious way of interrupting the reader with an advert, that same intelligent person will find a way to subvert our income generating scheme.
It’s the game of advertising, but the goal of a real change agent would be to find ways to still have a compelling product that means we still consume it and are willing to interact and compensate in other ways.
That’s what books are, what magazines are, what the CD we collect are, because at heart we don’t consume so viscerally as to be able to cope with downloaded ‘free’ content alone.
Love your classified analogy, particularly as the mainstream media have already almost discounted the section themselves

I enabled an ad blocker in my browser for the first time about a week ago when I realised how much time I was wasting watching the “Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net…” and other messages in the status bar.

It’s just ridiculous when you have half a dozen domains being contacted for images and Javascript for advertisements.

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About Me

Ben Kepes is a business leader, a technology evangelist, an entrepreneur, and a commentator. Ben covers the convergence of business and technology.